The Academic Side (or Lack Thereof) of Investor Relations

I’m happy to report that I have recently been appointed a lecturer in management to teach a class on investor relations at the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University. Teaching is something I’ve wanted to do since leaving the corporate world about eight months ago, so I’m delighted to have this opportunity, especially at an institution of the caliber of Rice.

Once the first blush of enthusiasm wore off, I started thinking about how to teach the class. Naturally, I immediately decided to do what all investor relations people do, which is to engage in peer comparisons. (Gale Wiley, the teacher of this class at Rice in previous years, has been generous in his advice, but I also wanted to try to get a larger picture.) I freely admit that if I could find good classroom materials and case studies, I would use them, as I had no desire to recreate the wheel. (I prefer to think of this as good research, not copying or plagiarism.) It turns out that the course on investor relations taught at Rice is the only class taught to MBA students that I could find. Northwestern, where I went to business school, chooses to teach investor relations out of the Medill School of Journalism, but beyond that I have found no other graduate school programs. There are certificate programs at several universities and a number of stand alone seminars in the subject, but no other graduate school programs that I could find.

Naturally, this started me thinking, why does this subject sit in academic limbo? Every publicly traded company has to deal with investors and is intimately concerned with its stock price, yet most business schools assume that if you just sort of throw the accounting numbers out there, the market will price the stock efficiently. What this ignores is that the stock price is a discount of future cash flows, and much of the future depends on management and their plans for the future. It is very difficult to figure much of that out without seeing management, hearing what they have to say and placing it in context. To put it another way, past performance coupled with the perception of future performance translates into stock price. The role of investor relations is to provide information both about why past performance was the way it was and what the expectations are for the future. Any finance professor will tell you that lack of information or asymmetric information leads to inefficient markets, so to put an academic spin on it, the role of investor relations is to make the market operate more efficiently by providing more information.

So perhaps this is the start of a campaign to bring more academic respectability to investor relations. When you think about the total value of stocks traded every day, it might make sense to pay a bit more attention to how information gets from companies to investors and the effect that has on investor behavior. On the other hand, it just might be the start for me of a long slide into academically obscure topics. Perhaps “Multidimensional Aspects of Asymmetric Information Flows Between Companies and Investors in the Equity Markets” would be a starting point.